From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume X

Introduction

This is the tenth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, and Volume IX is here. (The different volumes have little or nothing to do with one another.)

As with the last few installments, these are taken from ancient emails, back when I archived them as simple text files in the mistaken belief I’d be able to keep up with the practice. It didn’t last long, but has yielded some fun finds from a bygone era. I wrote all these when I was living in San Francisco, before moving to the burbs and becoming a parent.

December 26, 1994

[Having recently finished a 9-month bike tour] I’m still interviewing for a proper corporate-type job. In the meantime I’ve been working odd shifts at the bike shop in Berkeley, just to feel like I’m not a totally hopeless unemployed person. It’s a pretty ridiculous commute, first biking up and over California Street which has got to be at least a 15% grade, and then all the way under the bay on the Bart, for the typically paltry pay you get at a bike shop. Still, it’s diverting and often fun. For example, on Christmas Eve, a bike builder named Daniel, who has been on suspension without pay until further notice for sloppy work, brought in a 12-pack of Heineken, probably as a brown-nosing move. We threw it in the fridge, and brainstormed ways to get the owner, M—, to let us drink them on the job. M— was in a holiday mood, which was good; earlier, I’d “reminded” him of a policy of always buying lunch for members of the staff who wore staff t-shirts on Christmas Eve, and he went along with it. Well, by mid-afternoon the mad Christmas crowds were getting to me and the boys, and I proposed to M— the idea of discreet alcohol consumption to carry us through. M— said, “What, there’s beers!? Cool, gimme one.” Alas, it appeared we’d have no way to open them, lacking a bottle opener, but I grabbed a Maillard Helicomatic lock-ring tool and it worked great. In fact, it soon dawned on me that one half of the tool does the lock-ring, and the other is in fact nothing else but a bottle opener. You gotta love the French. Well, M— proceeded to walk out on the sales floor, beer in hand, and sell a bike. Needless to say it was a free-for-all after that.

January 1, 1995

I guess I forgot to give you my (kinda) new street address: it’s below. I had some fun moving in here. Our street is fairly flat, but our-cross street, Filbert, is crazy steep. They don’t call our neighborhood Russian Hill for nothing; our hills are as oppressive as Russia herself. Trucks and tour buses are prohibited on Filbert but that didn’t stop me from driving up it in the 14-foot U-Haul I rented. Its diesel engine was taxed to the limit, and I had this breathtaking, terrifying, yet oddly giddy feeling of impending doom. Halfway up—and too late to turn around—my inner ear started giving me (non-verbal) warning messages that the truck was about to pitch over backwards and tumble down the hill, end over end. It was such a fearsome feat that I almost got an erection. I held my breath and reassured myself with the fact that this time, I’d bought the full insurance. Anyhow, I made it over, down the other side on compression (the engine shrieking like it was gonna throw a rod), and then, as a final flourish, proceeded to parallel-park that baby in one of the toughest neighborhoods for parking in the entire city.

March 13, 1995

I am very gratified to get your response. The kind of honesty I indulged in via my letter to you, calling you out as I did, was admittedly dangerous—the recipient of such a letter can either take the painful, self-effacing route (which you did), or delude himself and continue to hide behind the falsity of his social veneer. This latter type, like a blindfolded tyke who has yet to learn object permanence, will assume that because he can’t see the truth, that it can’t see him. Of course such behavior is completely pathological. Right now I’m thinking of J— S—, whose insatiable desire to be cooler than me back in high school took the form of dissing me, like some kind of human sacrifice to the gods of cool. I thought to myself, “J—, can’t you do better than that? It’s not hard to be cooler than me—why don’t you try to be cooler than somebody who actually is cool? Like the Fonz? I mean, seriously … cooler than me? What kind of ambition is that?” I was originally drawn to J— as a friend, back in elementary school, because he was such a bold, unapologetic nerd. Unfortunately, it couldn’t last. Through what he probably thought was a social apotheosis from lowly dork into “happening dude” (his favorite phrase), I witnessed the slow, cancerous death of a personality.

May 2, 1995

Thanks for the warning about the virus! I’ve always wondered whether those anti-virus programs can detect viruses that come over e-mail. Fortunately, almost all my e-mail comes from trusted friends and relatives anyway. I did, however, receive a “junk mail” message at work. I guess business solicitations are frowned upon on the Internet, but on CompuServe [how I get and send e-mail], who knows, maybe anything goes. Anyway, I forwarded your warning message to everybody in my e-mail list (about 20 people).

So, yeah, e-mail sure is cool. It’s been wonderful to be able to write my brother Geoff without waiting for the normal three weeks or so it takes the postal service to carry physical mail to the Netherlands. Maybe I’ll get a sound card for my PC and record my actual voice, and send the recording as a binary file; Geoff could hear a reasonable computer facsimile of my voice on the other end! Of course that would be more of a parlor trick than anything useful. You know, the strangest thing about e-mail is that my dad, who by all means ought to be a master of this technology, has not actually joined up. And yet he has the computer, and the mind, for it. Bizarre.

August 6, 1995

You know what? Every time I make my Mexican rice, I think of the time I made it at your place in NYC, and scorched it. The horror! I am certain that you threw away the leftover rice, because it was, well, inedible. I only hope you didn’t have to throw away the pot since I’d blackened it so badly. I keep thinking about what a disaster that was. I say all this to my shame. I guess what I’m saying is, you should really come out to San Francisco so that I can try again with the rice, and show you that it really is good when the right ingredients and familiar kitchen equipment are on hand. I could send you back with a new pot, even. So if you get the chance, please come. Until then, I suppose you can just curse my name.

October 24, 1995

Using the formula f=mgh, and my stopwatch and altimeter data, I have calculated my power output for the climbs I biked up today: over a period of 16:30, I averaged 0.37 horsepower. But what does that mean? Does it mean I have a third of the strength of a horse? Well, not really; I don’t think horsepower applies to horses in the real world. But we do use horsepower to describe certain things. For example, my output was .0037 times the horsepower of a 1985 Volkswagen Jetta, I happen to know. And it would be more than enough to power a Hoover Mighty Might vacuum cleaner. If that’s not interesting to you, consider that 0.37 horsepower translates into 272 watts. That tells us my output is enough to power one of our chandeliers and a desk lamp.

November 1, 1995

Why yes, I’ve been to House of Nanking many times, and thanks for asking. I guess I can’t really recall what my favorite dishes are there, as I try to mix it up each time. Until recently, my strategy was to spend my time in line asking everybody else what they usually get. But the last time, I was in the mood for chow fun and asked the waiter, who is also the owner, if they had it. (In my experience, you can ask for just about anything, including chili mac, at a Chinese restaurant and they’ll have it, even if it’s not on the menu. Not that I have ever actually asked for chili mac. I’m just sayin’.) Well, the owner looked at me as if I were some kind of uncultured rube (which I may well be). “No, chow fun is white-man food!” he laughed. “This your first time here?” I said, “Uh … no.” He nodded and said, “I’ll set you up.” What then transpired you can well imagine, as you described your own Nanking dining experience so well in your last epistle … I need say nothing more. I love that place. It’s always worth the wait. I like the strange vegetables that they use—yams, for example. Totally unique (plus I normally hate yams). As far as the place being greasy, sure, it’s greasy, as Chinese food tends to be, but compared to most places, it goes down (and stays down) pretty darn well. Man. Now I can’t get that place off my mind.

August 27, 1996

How cool, I just figured out how to hook the CD-ROM in my computer into my boom box. It works great—so it looks like I bought computer speakers for nothing. Oh well. Now I can play CDs, which I never could before. Only problem is, I only own two CDs and they were both freebies that E— got from her work. I guess I could check out CDs from the library and tape them. Or of course I could do like everyone else and just go to the record store and buy music, but E— and I are trying to save up for a house one day, which is no easy feat in this area. We looked at a 2-bedroom condo a few doors down and it’s $250,000! There are 1-bedroom condos on top of Russian Hill for $1 million … as if! Sausalito is probably only slightly cheaper than San Francisco, and we’d have to pay $3 a day to commute in over the Golden Gate Bridge (not to mention fighting the traffic … no thanks). So we have to be pretty frugal while we figure out where, one day, we might be able to afford a place.

December 2, 1996

Just had the stomach flu. As if in some awful parody of the three-squares-a-day rule, I deposited my Thanksgiving dinner, in three installments, into the toilet (out the front end). Damn!

December 23, 1996

In reply to your question:

>>You’re set in Internet EtheReal Estate, hottest property going 
>>(the new frontier). But still one question: where do you put 
>>the relatives when they come to visit?

Well, it’s really pretty BASIC. First, I should say that my family members aren’t exactly queuing up to visit me. But when one or two of these characters feels the need to offload, I’m happy to let them nest in any free partition in my home. I help download their luggage (we have a little cache to store any valuables they might have). If they stay the night, I have a strange kind of cot I fashioned out of a kind of braided fiber (a web, you might say) that I’ve stretched over a mainframe. I have a nice spreadsheet for the cot, and some other soft wares, to make guests as comfortable as possible. Usually I keep the bedding compressed, but sometimes I set it up just for CIX and floppy down on it myself.

I’d really like to keep my domain open, but I normally limit it to friends and family. I mean, entertaining is a real effort for me—I guess I’m just not a natural-born server. Multi-tasking is hard for me so I just can’t monitor everyone all the time. I struggle to be a good host sometimes, and some guests I don’t like the slightest bit. Most are basically OK, but many just don’t observe the proper protocol. I can handle it if they’re not PC, but I won’t tolerate bad language. In fact, the next time I get a cursor, he’d better be ready to run, because I swear I’ll boot him!

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

From the Archives - My Day in Court!

Introduction

I recently described in these pages, in another “From the Archives” post, how I was busted by a cop for a bicycle infraction back in 1990. (If you missed it, you can catch up here.) Here’s the rest of the story: how I fought the ticket in court.

My day in Traffic Court — September 21, 1990

I used to be a morning person, back when I had a paper route. Not anymore, man … now 6 a.m. feels really harsh. I struggle to keep my eyes open as my roommate, a do-it-all grad student, chats merrily away. His words reach me through a thick haze. I’d still be blissfully asleep, except a dickhead cop gave me a ticket for a bicycle infraction last month and I have to go to court. The slip he handed me had a court date on it, but he said I’d get something in the mail giving me the option to just pay it. He didn’t know how much the ticket was for, and I still don’t … I never got anything in the mail. I’d probably be fighting this anyway, though. That’s just how I am.

The problem is, I have to go to court out near where I broke the law, which means Walnut Creek. I’m not about to bike all the way out there in street clothes so I have to take Bart, which sucks because I don’t exactly have that system dialed. And since they won’t let me bring my bike on Bart (this being the commute hour), I have to walk all the way from the station to the courthouse. And since I have to be there at 8, my morning is starting ungodly early.

Once I get there, I’ll have to be pleasant and obsequious, so I’ve decided to dress presentably. I put on khakis and this short-sleeve striped button-down Oxford shirt. I’m not saying this is a fashionable or even sharp-looking shirt; I suspect it’s actually a bit nerdy.  I bought it at Eaker’s years ago, which was probably the last time I ever went clothes shopping with my mom. I was in ninth grade, and spied one of my teachers in there. I pretended not to see her, and she returned the favor. I’m not sure but I think I’ve seen people smirk at me when I wear this shirt. (Of course, there’s a hundred other reasons people might smirk at me.) 

Naturally, being polite and deferential will just be a pose. Inwardly, I’m bristling at this ticket and at the law in general. So, to get myself in the proper frame of mind (i.e., defiantly assertive), as I scarf a bowl of corn flakes I listen to “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” by Public Enemy:

I got a letter from the government
The other day
I opened and read it
It said they were suckers
They wanted me for their army or whatever
Picture me givin’ a damn, I said never
Here is a land that never gave a damn
About a brother like me and myself
Because they never did
I wasn’t wit’ it, but just that very minute it
Occurred to me
The suckers had authority

It’s a great song, but doesn’t actually fit my situation very well. The military never asked me to serve, and I have no reason to suspect the government doesn’t care about me. That’s the problem with rap music: as much as I love it, it always reminds me how privileged and square and white I am. In my button-down Oxford shirt.

I get to the courtroom just before they start working their way through the docket. At registration I learn why I never got anything in the mail: the dickhead cop got my address wrong. Oh well! The fine is a whopping $81. At this news, I’m not actually that upset about the address screw-up. It’s totally worth fighting a fine this large, even though I might be here awhile. Could be ten minutes, thirty, or all day … it’s all down to luck.

The judge seems a lot cooler than the cop was. A 16-year-old kid who was busted for speeding, driving without a driver’s license, not having insurance, and driving with a cracked windshield is sentenced to a $500 fine and no license for two years. The judge asks him how he’ll raise the money, and the kid looks over at his mom. “Don’t look at her!” the judge snaps. Everybody laughs.

Next up is a young man busted for “exhibition of speed.” His defense: “Your honor, I was in a Ford Pinto.” The judge is not amused and gives the guy a good tongue-lashing about every car being dangerous when driven aggressively, etc. The guy loses his license, straight-up. Then there’s a college kid who ran a stop sign on his bike. His argument, amazingly enough, is that he doesn’t think a biker should have to obey all the same rules as a motorist. What a dip. The judge holds firm and says, “Now look here. My daughter just got her learner’s permit. You be more careful out there on your bike!”

I’ve worked a bit harder on my own defense. This isn’t the first time I’ve fought a bike ticket. The first time, my brother and I got popped for running a stop sign, but it was turning right onto a street that was closed down and had been barricaded off, for a bike race. My argument was that the cop wrote us up for doing 25 mph during the maneuver. I planned to say, “If the severity of the fine was based on the speed at which we supposedly did this, I have to question the officer’s estimate. Have you even tried to turn right at 25 mph on a bicycle while threading the needle between two barricades?” But in the event, I only got as far as, “My brother and I were riding to the San Luis Obispo criterium, and—” before the judge interrupted me: “Were you riding there to watch, or to compete?” I told him the latter, he reduced my fine to $20 on the spot, and I was done.

So I think as long as you have something to say besides “the law doesn’t apply to me” or “I was in a Ford Pinto,” you have a chance of getting the fine reduced. Today my argument is that the sign telling me to exit Highway 24 (which I’d failed to notice, hence my infraction) was in the wrong place. It’s close to a mile before the exit, which is great if you’re in a car doing 60, but not so much if you’re pedaling up the hill on a bike at under 10 mph. When my turn comes, I take the stand and the judge says, “I like your shirt.” Caught off-guard, I reply, “Um, excuse me, your honor?” He repeats, “I like your shirt.” I shrug and smile. “How about we lower this to $20?” he asks. Done! I’m going to hang on to this shirt. It’s like gold!

Standing in line to pay, I get to talking with a guy who just lost his license for a year for “minor in possession of alcohol.” I’d say most teenagers drink; this guy happened to get caught. He’s not that bent out of shape, though; in fact, he’s pretty mellow about it. “Yeah, I was sitting by the pool at my apartment complex drinking some beers,” he says, “and some neighbor lady called the cops. So they came out and busted me.” I ask how many beers. “A bunch,” he confesses, “but I wasn’t making any noise or anything, just drinking my beers.” Pretty crazy, huh? Dude’s not even driving a car when he gets busted, but the penalty is losing his license.

On my way walking back to Bart, the guy catches up to me and we talk some more. He’d been pulled over several times, and with the exception of the time he’d tried to outrun the police, they’d usually let him go because he was a Marine. “Put up with fifteen minutes of the cop recalling his glory days in the Corps,” he tells me, “and you’re off the hook.” He had some other alcohol‑related busts, though, so he was relegated from the Marines to the Army.

I ask him if he’s worried about the Kuwait situation, and he replies, “No, not really.” I ask if he thinks they might send him over to Desert Storm. “Yeah, I’m going in a week and a half,” he says. “That’s why I don’t really care about losing my license.” He says it like he’s going off to be a counselor at a day camp or something. But I guess that’s how it goes; he’s in the Army and fighting overseas is his job. Of course I ponder the paradox: he’s too young to legally drink beer, and has been deemed too irresponsible to drive a car, but he’s considered plenty ready to go kill people.

Our school paper recently interviewed some student ROTC reserves who are outraged about actually being called up to serve. In light of that flap, this guy’s attitude seems kind of refreshing. I can’t tell if his willingness is out of respect for authority—which would be ironic for someone who’s been in so much trouble—or because his friends are already there (which he did mention).

He gets my address and tells me he’ll write me about what it’s like on the front. I kind of doubt he actually will—I mean, doesn’t he have more important people, like family members, to write to?—but imagine if he did! That would make this $20 seem like a real bargain…

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--
For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Why Train Travel Is Better

NOTE:  This post is rated PG-13 for mild strong language and subtle insinuations of mild sensuality.

Introduction

 Six years ago I blogged (here, here, and here) about my family’s trip on Amtrak from the Bay Area to Chicago.  Well, we’re at it again.  I’m typing away from the observation car as the train makes its way through the mountains east of Grand Junction, Colorado.  Our destination this time is Denver.

(As far as you know I posted this after the fact and/or we’re flying straight home from there so by the time you read this it will be too late to burglarize our home.  Or maybe not … maybe this is the beginning of a long vacation, in which case you’re welcome to try to steal our sentimentally valuable but commercially useless family heirlooms, though you’ll have to deal with our psychotic gun-nut house-sitter and his meth-fueled pit bull, who never knew his father.)

Having tackled the overall train travel experience in my previous posts, today I’m going to give you the top 10 reasons why train travel is the best way to go. 

Reason #1:  Train travel is novel

Train travel is novel.  Flying has become as routine as taking a bus, more so actually, as has driving, and both activities get old pretty quickly (unless you’re driving on a cool highway like US 50).  And on the train if you get tired of your coach seat or sleeper car berth, you can mosey on up to the observation deck, or down to the lounge, and at mealtime you get to sit in the dining car (and actually, the Amtrak food is pretty darn good).  At bedtime if you’re in a sleeper you fold down one bed from above and turn the seats into another bed, which is really fun for kids (I think this gave my younger daughter goose bumps the first time).

The train stops from time to time, in places more rustic and less bland than the convenience stores along an interstate.  You can step off the train for a little fresh air.

Reason #2:  Flashers

Also, if you take the California Zephyr route you’ll cruise along the Truckee and Colorado rivers, where there are lots of rafters, and your chances of being mooned or flashed are very high.  It’s a long-standing tradition, apparently, for young men to moon the train, or young women to pull up their shirts or bikini tops for the benefit of Amtrak sightseers.  When my brother took his kids on this train back in ’05 they were flashed by rafters, as was my wife in ’06 (while my head was, alas, turned the wrong way).  And while I was sitting here peering into my laptop just now, a rafter flashed the passengers to my right.  I’m so bummed to have missed that.  Serves me right for writing this instead of just gazing out the window and watching life go by.  I hope you’re happy.

Reason #3:  Better for the planet

Wikipedia reckons that “a train seems to be on average 20 times more efficient than automobile for transportation of passengers, if we consider energy spent per passenger-km.”  They base this on an assumption of the car getting 39 mpg, which is far better than most cars get, especially with a bunch of luggage and/or bikes fastened to the roof rack.  In contrast, Wikipedia estimates that a passenger train gets 468 passenger-miles per gallon of fuel.

I’m not sure how Wikipedia gets their “20 times more efficient” figure because they don’t show their work.  My Volvo gets about 28 mpg on the highway, so with 4 passengers that’s 28*4 = 112 passenger-miles per gallon, which—compared to the train’s 468 passenger-miles/gallon—makes the train look only 4.2 times as efficient as a fully-loaded automobile.  I’m not going to ponder this disparity at length, because I’m more interested in comparing a train to a plane.

Wikipedia estimates that an Airbus 380 (the dumpy plane most of us tend to fly) gets 78 passenger-miles per gallon.  That means the train is 6 times more efficient (per passenger) than the plane. On top of that, the plane is polluting up in the atmosphere where the emissions do the most damage.  The so-called “climatic forcing” effect of jet aircraft means that although “per passenger a typical economy-class New York to Los Angeles round trip produces about 715 kg (1,574 lb) of CO2,” this is “equivalent to 1,917 kg (4,230 lb) of CO2.”  That is, the fact of the aircraft emissions being high in the atmosphere increases the environmental damage by a factor of 2.7.  So the train is actually about 16 times less bad for the environment than a plane.  In other words, for the environmental cost of one family vacation involving air travel, we could take 16 train trips of equal length.

If these numbers start to make your head swim or your eyes glaze over, here’s a more interesting way to express the efficiency of trains:  in 2007 a man dragged a 7-coach train weighing almost 300 tons along its track for more than 9 feet, using his teeth.  This is possible because the steel-on-steel interface between the train wheels and the track incurs so little friction.  (You think that guy could lift even a small single-engine aircraft off the ground with his teeth?)

A final environmental consideration:  the benefit of your choice doesn’t end with your train trip.  Amtrak pays freight train companies for the use of their tracks, so by supporting Amtrak you’re also supporting the railroad freight industry, which is far greener than long haul trucking.

Reason #4:  Can be cheaper

If you can tolerate coach class—where the seats are way bigger than an airplane’s, by the way, with far more legroom—Amtrak can be very inexpensive.  I’m sharing a table in this observation car with an lady who is traveling from Winnemucca, NV to some town just outside Chicago for under $280, round-trip.  The gal across the aisle is going from the Bay Area to Denver and the total tab, one-way, is $222 … which covers herself and her two kids.  (Full disclosure:  this was her original cost, but a couple days before her trip, Amtrak ran a special on the sleeper car so she upgraded for “not much money.”)

The sleeper car is generally a lot more expensive than coach, but I sprung for the sleeper car because this is our big vacation for the year.  It was worth paying extra just to be able to tell my kids, “We’re livin’ large as possible, posse unstoppable, style topical, vividly optical.”  I can’t make this boast with air travel because first class there is way too much money to even consider, and the seats are still smaller than even the coach seats on Amtrak.  (Each seat in the sleeper cabin is wide enough for two.)

Reason #5:  None of the airline bullshit!

I hate flying.  Going through the security check, and having to take off my shoes (even though the one guy who tried to smuggle explosives in his shoe got caught), and having to drink up or forfeit my water, and let some guy pat me down so closely I expect him to ask for my phone number afterward, and then having to take my bag over to some table where somebody runs a little cloth swab all over it to check for explosives—as if!—and then, once I’m finally on the plane, being deprived of legroom, food, even peanuts, and invariably being seated right above the wing with the jet engine shrieking in my ear, and having the baggage policy get ever stingier practically every time I fly, and being asked to pay—get this—$150 each way to bring my 17-pound bicycle on the plane … it’s all just such bullshit I can’t even describe it without the “-shit” part.  I tried to use “BS” but it just wasn’t enough.

On Amtrak, there is no security check.  None.  I mean, what are you going to do, hijack the train and make them take you to the Flagstaff, AZ station instead of Denver?  The Amtrak process is so simple:  you make your reservation, print out your single sheet of paper which serves as the boarding pass for your whole family, show up at the station 45 minutes in advance (no check-in required), and bring practically as many bags as you want, for free, and take them right to the train where you’ll have access to them the whole trip and never have to wait for them to come off the carousel.

And you know what?  If you’re not that organized, and you get a late start riding bikes to the station with your teenage daughter, and if Google Maps totally screws you by leading you not to the station but to a barren place across the tracks and more importantly across a giant fence from the station, so you have to spend an extra ten minutes racing around on surface streets, you can literally roll up with your bike less than 15 minutes before the train leaves.  At least, my daughter and I did, and incurred only a very mild, brief tongue-lashing at the ticket counter, where I paid $10 each to take our bikes on the train.  And the bikes, un-boxed (because Amtrak had run out of boxes), didn’t have to go through some system of conveyor belts like at an airport, which present some danger to the bikes, which danger the airlines—being dicks about this, like everything—accept no liability for.  I put the bikes on a luggage cart, and the conductor said they’d just be leaned on a wall and lashed down.  Simple.

Reason #6:  Less stressful than driving

Driving is a leading cause of accidental death.  Even if you’re the best driver ever, you’re sharing the road with drunks, and irresponsible young men who think driving fast is a game, and drivers who just plain suck.  And you have no control over the weather, which can turn your road trip into a nightmare.

With a train, you’re responsible for  getting yourself to the station and that’s about it.  Then you can read, sleep, look out the window, play a board game, blog, or take advantage of the seventh reason why trains are better.

Reason #7:  Friendly fellow passengers

It is technically possible to have a good conversation on an airplane with a fellow passenger, but highly unlikely.  First of all, your only opportunity is with the person in the next seat, vs. wandering around a train with the opportunity to chat up anybody who seems friendly.  Second, most air travelers are too angry, too tense, and/or (if they’re on business) too preoccupied to want to chat.  In my experience, everybody in the Amtrak observation car is there to soak up the view and relax.  I’ve conversed with several friendly passengers today.

Conversely, if you don’t feel like chatting, you don’t have to be rude to the person in the (assigned airline) seat next to you who keeps asking what you’re reading instead of letting you read.  On a train, you can just return to your seat, or into your sleeper car where you can close the curtain and/or door.

Now, if you’re sharing an automobile with your favorite people, of course you can chat with them, but only to a point.  If you’re the one driving, you shouldn’t get too caught up in the conversation or you’ll become that “distracted driver” that is such a menace to society.  (Once, at the end of a 6-hour drive, I missed the exit to my mom’s town because I was so caught up in reciting the poem “Kill My Landlord.”)  If you’re not driving, you need to take care to not distract the driver too much.  And you can’t have a good conversation with your kids because they’re too busy fighting in the backseat, and dispensing toilet paper out the window to make comets, and fussing, and squirming, and asking, “Are we there yet?”  On the train you can split them up, banish them to their sleeping room, or tell them to go pester the conductor about the ETA.

Reason #8:  Better scenery

The view from the tiny plastic airplane window is okay during takeoff and landing, but once you’re at cruising altitude you’re usually too far up to see much.  Occasionally the pilot will get on the PA and say, “Those of you on the right side of the aircraft can see the Grand Canyon down there … looks a little like a cracked lip.”  Often there’s cloud cover below the plane so you can’t see anything at all.

The view from an automobile is better, but you still don’t see as much.  Train tracks sometimes go through places that don’t have roads.  I’ve been looking out at the Colorado River and the gorge it winds through, and it’s pretty impressive.  The tracks go through less developed areas so the landscape is often especially impressive.

Right now the train is threading its way between Routt National Forest and Arapaho National Forest, near the towns of Kremmling, Heeny, and Sheephorn.  Have you heard of these places?  Of course not, and that’s the point.  (“I used to live in Kremmling,” a friendly fellow passenger just piped up, having perhaps read that over my shoulder.  “One saloon and one cabin.”)

Even familiar scenery can be completely changed by the unique vantage point of the train.  I’ve seen the Carquinez Bridge hundreds of times, but never from below, as I did yesterday.

There are even volunteer docents on some stretches, who will give you history about an area (such as the gold country or the gorge we’re going through now).  They don’t just drone on either; they’re pretty funny.  “Look at that white thing way up on the bank there—that’s a Suburban,” one just said.  “That’s a teenager’s driving lesson.”

You also get to see cooler animals via the train.  On this trip my family has seen antelope; prairie dogs; some strange animal we’re calling a desert badger; a jackrabbit; mule deer; and even a T-Rex scarfing baby Ewoks like they were croutons.  (I made that last bit up to see if you’re still awake.)  Some animals seem curious about the train whereas no living creature has any interest in cars (except certain humans).

On top of all this, you’re not going that fast on the train, so you get a better look at everything.  (And you still get where you’re going sooner than a car because the train doesn’t stop for the night.)

Reason #9:  Don’t have to look at people

There comes a time during a conventional voyage when you get so bored, you may be unable to resist looking at other people.  How often have you been on a 6-hour flight and you get so stir-crazy you decide to head over to the lavatory, even though you know there’ll be a line, and you stand there looking out over all the other bored, irritated people, packed in like cattle, and you just hate them all?  Or you’re so bored during a drive that you start to look at every driver you pass, and in every single case they’re looking back at you, and you’re both thinking, “What are you lookin’ it?!” and it’s just kind of creepy?

I guess if the answer to those (albeit rhetorical) questions is “No,” then you’re a better person than I am, and you can have your boring interstate highways and jam-packed airplanes.  For me, boredom just isn’t a problem on a train, and there’s so much to look at, and everybody looks better to me because, like them, I’m so much more cheerful.

Reason #10:  No deep vein thrombosis or perforated eardrums

Okay, I’ll concede that deep vein thrombosis isn’t exactly an epidemic.  It’s the rare person who, due to being too cramped and still for too long, suffers a blood clot that moves through his/her system and causes a pulmonary embolism.  But it can happen.  What if you got one and died on a plane or in your car?  Wouldn’t that be a rotten way to go?  (“He died as he lived … stuck in coach” or “He didn’t die alone … his car veered over several lanes and took out a school bus.”)

Meanwhile, train travel is easier on your ears.  The pressure changes on a train are very gradual.  As you cross the Continental Divide, you might notice the foil on a single-serving coffee creamer start to bulge, but you won’t feel much in your ears.  This train is at over 7,000 feet elevation right now and I’ve barely felt a thing.  Airplanes are different.  Cabin pressure is at cruising altitude is equivalent to 5,000 feet of elevation, and can decrease to zero in a matter of minutes when you land.  Once, I had a minor cold resulting in a clogged Eustachian tube, so when the plane descended I suffered a perforated eardrum.  This was absolutely excruciating and turned my ear into a geyser of blood and pus for several days, and required several follow-up visits with a doctor.

Bonus Reason:  Hand-to-hand combat

If you try to give somebody a real beat-down in the aisle of a passenger jet, you’ll probably get arrested when you land.  And an automobile is just too confined a space for a good fistfight—your elbows keep hitting things.  The sleeping cabin of a train, however, is private and spacious.  I could hear my daughters going at it from across the aisle.  They don’t pack a good punch, those girls, so neither was injured, but I think they had a good, satisfying tussle.

This was confirmed when I interviewed my daughters for this post.  Among the reasons my older daughter gave for preferring train travel was “Can finally fight it out with your sister once and for all.”  She even admitted that she was fantasizing a bit about being James Bond, who never boarded a train without having one final battle with this or that nemesis.  (And for the record, upon reading over my shoulder just now, she has assured me that she was pulling her punches and actually could have done serious damage.  Maybe on the way home?)

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--

For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Tire Chains II - The Spawning

Announcement

I am happy to announce that this is my 200th post on albertnet!  My first post was in February of 2009, over four years ago.  My 100th post was in March, 2011.  Odd … it doesn’t feel like I’ve been at it that long.

Introduction

You may wonder what I mean by “The Spawning.”  Well, that’s just an extra phrase I like to add when giving the name of any sequel, because it just says “cheap retread.”  I got this phrase from “Piranha II – The Spawning,” which was James Cameron’s first full-length film, and a bad one—one reviewer called it a “near-total disaster” and “almost impossibly bad.” Oddly enough, “Piranha II” wasn’t actually a sequel to “Piranha.”  Its original title was “Flying Killers” and I guess making it look like a sequel was an attempt to cash in on the earlier (also terrible) movie.

This post isn’t exactly a sequel, either, though it has much in common with an earlier archival post, “Trouble with Tire Chains.”  What follows is another snow-packed tale of road trip woe, this one even more harrowing than the original.  I think the phrases “near-total disaster” and “almost impossibly bad” work pretty well in describing it.  (Of course it could have been worse, like if somebody had been injured, but then I wouldn’t be blogging so lightly about it.)

It started as a vacation

My family decided to spend the kids’ spring break in Colorado, where we have friends and family.  Five years ago we did this same trip and encountered a freak snowstorm on Vail Pass, where our 1984 Volvo had just enough traction to keep moving.  On the way home from that trip, we took I-80 through Wyoming to avoid Vail Pass, only to hit an icy section and slide right off the highway, as had more than a hundred other cars on that stretch that day (click here and search on “April 11, 2008” for details).  We figured the weather should be better this year; I mean, what are the odds we’d get such strange weather a second time?

Ha.  Ha ha ha ha ha.  This time the storm was far, far worse.  The weather in Nevada and Utah had been fine, but the closer to Vail Pass we got, heading east on I-70, the worse the reports were.  Vail Pass was eventually closed due to ice and multiple accidents.  A parking lot was set up to accommodate stranded motorists, but it was full by the time we got there.  We could have stayed the night somewhere to wait out the storm, but the weather forecast for the area was “endless snow for the rest of our miserable, frigid lives with absolutely no sign of respite.”  (I’m paraphrasing.)  I didn’t fancy living out the rest of my days in a little town like Eagle or Edwards (slogan:  “Home of the Kobe Bryant sex scandal!”).

So:  onward.  Electronic signs advised us to use “alternate routes,” of which there was only one:  taking Highway 24 south to Leadville, and coming back northeast on Highway 91, about a 45-mile detour.  We guessed that this is what the signs were suggesting (the lack of specificity perhaps being for liability reasons).  The gal at the Colorado Visitors Center in Eagle checked the conditions on these highways and said they should be okay.

Detour around Vail Pass

Much signage warned that commercial vehicles—i.e., semis—were not allowed on Highway 24, but that didn’t stop one trucker from trying, and jackknifing his vehicle in the process.  An indescribably masculine tow truck was hooking up to it when we came by.  I immediately thought of a Radiohead song:  “In the next world war/ In a jackknifed juggernaut/ … An airbag saved my life.”

Traction wasn’t bad on these twisty little highways.  Our car, a 2006 Volvo V70 wagon with front-wheel drive, has good tires on the front and new ones on the back, along with computerized Stability Traction Control (STC) and a winter-driving mode that rides the clutch while you start up from a stop.  So I figured we’d be okay, even though it was snowing increasingly hard and it was becoming difficult to keep ice off the windshield.

 

From bad to worse

When we got back on I-70 eastbound there wasn’t much traffic—only those cars that had taken the detour like us—but a number of drivers were going way, way too fast.  I’m not some craven poltroon when it comes to snow driving—I learned the craft as a teenager in Boulder, without the inhibition of a fully formed prefrontal cortex—but I have respect for icy conditions and the high stakes of highway driving.  (After being a passenger in a high-speed rollover back in 1984, I learned to appreciate that these kicky, fun vehicles—the heartbeat of America—can also be accurately described as killing machines.)  I crept along at about 30 mph while guys in 4WD pickup trucks sailed by at 50 or 60, with complete faith that 4WD means nothing bad can happen.  This blithe belief in pure fiction reminded me of something … but what?  Finally it hit me:  in their carefree ignorance these motorists are just like the teenage girls who believe they can’t get pregnant the first time they have sex.  Sure enough, we did see a few vehicles off the side (all of them 4WD, I hasten to add).

Everything was fine (other than increasingly poor visibility) until we hit a long uphill and the strangest thing happened.  The car just started to slow down, regardless of what I did with the gas pedal.  Moreover, the Stability Traction Control (STC) light on the dashboard, which lights up when this feature kicks in, went from an occasional flicker to being on practically all the time.  According to an online Volvo forum, when STC detects slippage it “retards the timing to keep the revs at an acceptable level to prevent slip.”  The problem was, there was so little traction, the transmission was putting power to the wheels less and less of the time.  After making sure nobody was behind me, I tried the left lane to see if it was less slick.  It wasn’t.  Eventually, to my utter horror, the car simply came to a stop!

I had thought that making it through this ordeal would depend mainly on my skill as a driver.  So long as I kept the speed down, used engine compression (not the brakes) to decelerate, and kept a cool head, I figured, everything would be fine.  But it turns out the enterprise was doomed from the outset.  A car this heavy, with these tires, on a road surface this slippery, could not possibly make it over a grade this steep, no matter who was driving.  It was all a matter of physics, with no room for negotiation.

Completely screwed!

In accordance with a corollary of Murphy’s Law, my car had come to a stop not far after a blind curve.  I immediately checked behind us—still nobody coming—and attempted to back up and steer right, to get the car onto the shoulder.  Actually, there wasn’t much of a shoulder, which is one of the reasons I hadn’t attempted to install my tire chains:  the chances of being run over by an overconfident driver had, up until now, seemed higher than the likelihood of chains being necessary.

Have you ever watched a propeller plane stunt pilot do a hammerhead stall?  The plane flies straight up until it stalls (or seems to stall), and then the nose comes around (whether due to pilot input or some by-product of the physics of the aircraft) and the pilot flies straight down until he gets enough speed to regain control.  Well, for some reason, as I rolled backward, my car attempted a hammerhead stall of its own.  There was absolutely nothing I could do to keep the front end from swinging around.  This is how I found myself pointing the wrong direction on I-70!  It was all I could do to steer into the snow bank beside the left lane.  I ended up stuck there, facing the oncoming traffic!

Keeping an eye on the road and honking my horn whenever a car approached, I dialed 911 from my cell phone.  When the dispatcher gathered that my car wasn’t damaged and there weren’t injuries, she transferred me to a DOT call center.  The person there said she’d try to get a tow truck out to me.  This of course seemed highly unlikely:  the only way to get to where I was, to my knowledge, was via that 45-mile detour near Leadville.  The cars I’d seen off the road looked to have been long abandoned.  My options seemed limited to sitting in my car and waiting for help, or installing my chains in the middle of the interstate just past a blind curve.  (My wife thought of a third plan—she offered to try pushing the car out—but I refused:  too dangerous, plus it wouldn’t address the greater problem, which was our ongoing lack of traction.  I could see my hammerhead stall scenario simply repeating.)

Tire chains and the law

Before too long a DOT truck pulled up.  The DOT guy parked in my lane about fifty feet back with his big yellow warning lights on, and came over to assess my situation.  He said a snowplow was on its way, that was spitting sand out the back.  Sure enough, it showed up, and stopped just ahead of my car (i.e., uphill from us).  The DOT guy pulled out a shovel and started taking loads of sand from the back of the snowplow truck and shoveling it under my tires.  He was oddly cheerful, like this was all just a grand adventure.  As I walked to the back of the car to get my tire chains, I realized the entire surface was nothing but ice.  Really:  no bare asphalt, no sand, no mere packed snow.  My feet were slipping all over the place.  The road was all ice, the whole damn thing.  With the right power tools we could have made enough Slurpees for everyone in Colorado.

A cop showed up.  He eyed my tires and said, “Those don’t look like very good snow tires.  You should think about getting something better.  Continental makes some nice ones.”  I replied, “Well, I’m from California.”  (Driving in snow as seldom as I do, I’m not about to buy snow tires.  Frankly, if I’d had any inkling the roads would be this bad, I’d have simply canceled the trip.)

I do wish, now, that I had some photos of all this.  A picture in this case would be worth about five hundred regular words and five hundred profanities, many of them from you.  But of course getting out the camera would have been ridiculous.  In the midst of a crisis, snapping photos is in very poor taste … just ask Lynndie England.

The cop asked what the plan was.  The DOT guy said, “I’m going to finish sanding behind his tires and then push him out, and then he can follow the snowplow the rest of the way.”  The cop told him, “Don’t try to push him out.  It’s too dangerous.  He could crush you with his car.”  I told the cop, “I was thinking of putting on my tire chains, now that the traffic is blocked behind me.”  I had the chains out now and was untangling them in preparation.

If you read my other tire chain post, you know how much I despise chains, but most of that is ideological:  whenever I’ve had to use them, it was because the DOT pointlessly mandated it, when the conditions were actually fine.  Sure, chains are a drag to install, especially when it’s only 20 degrees out and your hat and gloves are buried in your luggage, but when your car has become a two-ton paperweight stranded on the highway, you suck it up.  Or at least I do.

But the cop replied, “Don’t put on your chains.  They’re not going to help, not here.  Actually, I don’t think chains really belong on cars.  They work for semis and that’s about it.”  Surprised as I was to hear this, I wasn’t going to argue.  For one thing, I try never to argue with cops, and for another, his confidence in me, a California driver with three-season Yokohama tires, was infectious, especially when I had a sand-spewing snowplow to lead me.

The only problem was, the cop continued to argue with the DOT guy about the pushing-me-out strategy.  It got pretty heated.  Eventually the DOT guy said, “Hey, man, I’m just here to get a paycheck!”  Incongruous as this was, the cop either acquiesced, decided at this moment debate was pointless, or got sick of my ordeal—who knows which—and got back into his car.  Following this the DOT guy successfully pushed me out, the snowplow got rolling again, and as the DOT guy yelled “GO!  GO!  GO!” my car magically gripped the sand-enhanced road and we set off.  I don’t think we broke 10 mph, but I wasn’t complaining.  This went on until the Eisenhower Tunnel, at which point the snowplow pulled off and I was on my own.

Once more into the breach

While we were stopped, my wife had scraped clean the windshield, so visibility was a lot better for awhile, but I know we weren’t out of the woods yet.  It was snowing harder than ever and the road was still slicker than snot.  Still, I figured the closer we got to civilization and the car-worn roads, the better off we’d be, and I was actually starting to feel more optimistic when we made it past Georgetown (elevation 8,530, a couple thousand feet lower than Vail Pass).  Looking back, it seems impossible that this is a distance of only thirteen miles.  Covering it seemed to take forever.

And then, on an uphill that came out of nowhere, I felt that dreaded sensation of the car losing more and more speed.

When it became obvious we were grinding to a halt, I acted on a desperate hunch that the STC might be too conservative, cutting too much power to the wheels.  So I turned it off.  Whether due to the lack of STC or my having taking a hand off the wheel, or both, I immediately lost control of the car and we veered sharply to the right.  By this point we were out of momentum and traction anyway, and the car came to a halt.  Again, this was just past a blind curve.  What’s worse, traffic had picked up, and it was dusk (a terrible time for visibility). 

Prior to this trip, I wasn’t sure whether or not my two daughters knew any swear words; now I’m certain they do.  As my wife scrambled to find the DOT phone number I’d jotted down earlier, an old beater car passed us and pulled over.  I abandoned the phone call (what would I have said anyway?) and got out to talk to the car’s driver, a twenty- or thirty-something guy with the hip, sporty look of a rock climber and/or espresso aficionado.  He cautioned me that he’d seen a driver stuck in this spot before and it had caused chaos, with cars and big rigs having to change lanes very suddenly in the midst of the curve.  “I can park behind you, before the curve, with my hazards on,” he told me.  “Do you have chains?  If you’ll take care of me, I’ll put them on—I know how.” 

I could have installed the chains myself, with him merely stopping traffic behind me, but we were quickly running out of daylight so it made sense to tag-team it.  I must say I was happy to let somebody else lie down in the road to get the inboard side of the chains hooked up.  He had a snowsuit, at least.

Tire chains vindicated

The process didn’t go too badly, considering.  Sure, my hands got so numb I couldn’t even tell I was cutting them up on frayed steel cable strands, and it was hard to tell what we were doing in the dim light, and our feet were slipping on the ice road, but we got ‘er done.  We also troubleshot the windshield wipers, which had become less and less effective since the tunnel.  It turns out that so much ice had built up within the mechanism at the base of the wiper arms, the blades weren’t even contacting the windshield.  I dug the ice out of the passenger-side wiper while the Samaritan guy worked on the driver side.  Suddenly the wiper blade snapped off in his hand.  I held out some hope that it was just the one-size-fits-all adapter that had come unsnapped, vs. an actual breakage, and to my great relief this turned out to be the case.

I gave the guy all the cash I had, which was $60, and he looked totally stoked.  “That’s too much!” he protested.  I insisted he take it.  He offered to drive behind us until the top of the hill just in case anything went wrong.

Unbelievably, my car did manage to creep forward up the hill.  I couldn’t get much speed up—the STC light was still flashing continually—but the chains were doing the trick.  Alas, there was a very ominous thwack-thwack-thwack sound from one of the chains, so I had to stop again.  The Samaritan stopped again and came to help.  The loose end of the cable had come unclipped but the chain was still intact.  While he and I fixed this, a DOT truck saw us and pulled over.  It turned out to be the same guy who’d helped me earlier.  “You again?!” he said.  I told him I was basically okay this time and thanked him for stopping.  As he made his way back to his truck he said, “See you around!”  I replied, “Hey, no offense, but I really hope I never see you again!”

(By the way, as regards that heading above about tire chains being vindicated:  that applies only to ice-rink conditions such as you’ll sometimes find in Colorado.  I still stand behind my previous excoriations of pointless tire chain mandates for the occasionally cold, wet roads you’ll find in California.)

Final leg

With the chains on and the wipers working, our progress was more predictable (though still really slow).  It got dark.  The snow was blowing so hard, and my eyes were so tired, I was stunned again and again by a deeply disturbing optical illusion.  Have you ever been in a car wash, with your engine stopped and your parking brake on, and you suddenly thought the car was rolling forward because the big mop-like brushes came at you and shifted your frame of reference?  Something similar was going on here.  My windshield was once again icing up (despite my running the defroster full time), so I was watching the taillights of the car a couple hundred feet ahead of me, matching its speed exactly because the driver seemed to know what he or she was doing.  The combination of my low speed, my lockstep progress behind this other car, and the absence of any other visual cues indicating forward motion, along with the millions of snowflakes blowing by (like the stars when the Millenium Falcon reaches light-speed), gave the perception that my car was standing still.  This of course was frightening given that coming to an unplanned stop was my greatest concern.

Throughout this drive, my kids were chattering away merrily in the back seat, evidently completely oblivious of the danger we were in.  I guess I should be glad they have such complete faith in their parents, as opposed to thinking we’re totally lame (though I know this will come soon enough).  At times, though, it was oppressive trying to concentrate amidst all their giggling and (occasionally) their fighting.  And while I was wondering if we’d even make it at all, my younger daughter kept asking, “How long until we’re there?”  I’m proud to say I resisted the temptation to yell, “SHUT UP OR WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!”

Just as we reached Boulder, heading north on Highway 93, we saw a car that had gone off the road, pointing north but in the ditch on the left.  Either he’d been heading north and somehow slid across four lanes, or he’d been heading southbound and did a 180.  My wife phoned to report it as we continued on our way.  We were halfway across Boulder when the Samaritan passed us again, tooting his horn.  Finally we arrived at our friends’ house.  The 400-mile drive had taken over twelve hours. 

Epilogue

It snowed in Boulder again the next day, and the day after that.  It snowed again this past Monday, and yet again yesterday, but I don’t care anymore because we did manage to make it home last Friday without further incident.  I spent half of Sunday overhauling my poor bike, whose headset and bottom bracket bearings were completely black when I repacked them.

Needless to say, the whole time we were gone it was gloriously sunny and warm out here in California.  I think I’m done with spring break in Boulder.  Next year I think we’ll just stay home and hang out.  I can rent some movies for the kids … maybe “Alive” or “Death Race 2000.”  Hell, I might even check out “Piranha II – The Spawning.”

From the Archives - Freshmen Hoods

NOTE:  This post is rated R for pervasive strong language.

Introduction

Below is a true story I wrote back in college about a road trip I took with some insufferable fellow students I met through the ride board.  For any readers who can’t remember a time before craigslist, the ride board was a physical bulletin board on campus where you’d tack non-virtual flyers saying “I have room for two passengers going to Los Angeles to share gas and help with the driving” or “I need a ride to Sacramento and will help with gas.”  One year I couldn’t find a ride to San Luis Obispo so I rented a car and offered to drive others.  Nobody else was going to San Luis Obispo but some dirtbags wanted to go to Santa Barbara for the big Halloween party there that was so big in those days they brought in a giant van of extra cops.  As you shall see, offering to drive partiers to that event turned out to be a really bad idea.

Freshmen Hoods – November 11, 1992

The Y’shua man is yelling when I pull up to the curb of Bancroft next to  Sproul Plaza.  As usual, he is pacing up and down, wearing his standard tight blue t-shirt with the simple “Y’shua” logo, glaring at a spot on the ground ahead  of him, his face lean, hard, and cross.  I can’t make out any of his doctrine,  but  to my amusement  he shouts out his chorus with frequent regularity, and  at tremendous volume:  “Y’SHUA!  Y’SHUA!” His cry sounds like that of a  wounded animal.  Shadowing him ruthlessly, matching his stride and hovering  less than a foot from his face, is an obviously homeless man, scraggly and  skinny, wearing a skirt of a pastel floral pattern, a ragged leather vest, and  a fake fruit hat.  This is Hate Man, and he heckles Y’shua Man ceaselessly to  the delight of student onlookers. 

“Hearken to our Master!” begins Y’shua Man.

“Masturbator!” yells Hate Man.  The students laugh.  A much younger,  collegiate looking boy in a polo shirt and jeans also matches Y’shua Man’s  pacing, and abuses him after his model in Hate Man.  This is one of the  several disciples of Hate Man.  Yes, disciples.  Does this youth aspire to one day be homeless  as well, and wear Salvation Army dresses?

Two freshman-looking boys shout at Y’shua Man.  “Give it up, man!  Get a  life!  Fuckin’ queer-bait!”  What makes these two freshman looking?  One has tremendously baggy jeans—parachutes, really—which sag so much the crotch is  around his knees like on a old man, and his torso looks twice as long as his  legs.  His face has that cultivated stubble look, like he’s gone without shaving for two weeks to achieve a two-day growth.  His tuff scowl needs a cigarette—but then I would feel compelled to say, “Get that thing out of your mouth,  son, it doesn’t make you cool.”  The other youth is in a baggy blank white t-shirt and has a moussed and blown dry hairdo:  hairs shoot straight up and  curve straight back like the top of a hoe.  I’d like to say, “Oh, wow, you  look like that guy on Beverly Hills 90210.”  And he would die of embarrassment.

He yells at Y’shua man, “Get lost, dude!  You’re not wanted here!  You hear me, man, yo! I’m  talking to you man, pack it up!  Fuckin’ jerk!”  He pronounces “dude” like “doad.”

Y’shua Man has a pretty strong conviction of some kind, I’m thinking.   As for Hate Man, he is homeless and has nothing to do.  But what excuse do these guys have for bothering to participate in this pointless menagerie?  A chartered bus behind me starts honking.  The driver, looming high above me behind his giant  flat steering wheel, is yelling and gesturing for me to move.  I roll forward  until he’s clear, and stop.  Suddenly a young woman appears at my passenger window.

“Are you Dana?” she asks. 

“Yeah, and you’re Ana?” I reply.  She nods her head.  This is one of my  passengers from the Associated Students Ride Board.  I got four other people to share the cost of a rental car  and gas.  Since none of them is twenty one yet, I have to do all the driving.   And since they’re all going to the Hallowe’en party in Isla Vista, the student  ghetto of the University of California at Santa Barbara, I have to drive them  all the way there, even though I’m only headed for San Luis Obispo to visit my  brother.

“Looks like we’re in for a long trip,” she says with a sigh, gesturing  with her chin over her shoulder.  The horror!  Approaching the car are the two  freshman punks—the sagging crotch guy and the skippy hairdo  guy—heading our way,  dragging canvas duffel bags.  With them is a zit-faced, unkempt girl with long, oily brown hair.  Her shirt looks like it was made of  a burlap sack. 

“Dude, yah!  Fucking rad ride, dude.  You Dana?”

“Yeah.  And you’re . . . Justin?”  I’d actually pictured Justin as a gang  member, a Crip or a Blood maybe, after our phone conversations.  I think he’d be thrilled that he sounded like a black guy over the phone, but he’s just as white as I am.

“Yeah, dude.”  He shakes my hand as tightly as possible.  “Yo, and dis is  Mark, man.  Dude.  And Tracy.” 

“Wait, what about Andrea?”

“Aw, dude, she fuckin’ flaked on me.  But yo, I filled her spot.  So  let’s hit the road an’ shit.”

I make sure Ana gets the front seat and we head out.  I experiment with  turning up the stereo to drown out the banter behind me, but the speakers  won’t go loud enough, and then an R.E.M. song comes on and I have to turn it  off.  So I listen to Justin for awhile.

“Yo, so like I was tellin’ that Andrea chick, ‘Yo, so like we gotta be on  da the road like 1:55, ‘cause we gotta fuckin’ get down there early, ya know,  to party up an’ shit.’  An’ then she’s all sayin’ like she might not be able  to get outta some fuckin’ class, an’ I’m like, ‘No, sorry, babe, you gotta  totally commit or dat’s it, man.  Now I’m gonna call my other homie, right,  and den I’m callin’ you back, an’ if you are one hundred percent sure on this,  you’re not fuckin’ comin’ ‘cause we gotta be sure.’  So den I call Mark and  he’s like, ‘Yah, man, I could use a fuckin’ trip down to see my brutha in L.A.  but I gotta see if he can come meet me.’  Ain’t dat what you were saying,  Mark?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, so like he fuckin’ calls his bro’ an’ shit, and so I’m like  thinkin’ fuck, man! I gotta get someone, and then he calls me back and says  like “Yoah, dude, let’s fuckin’ do it,’ and I’m all ‘Yeah!’  So I call back  Andrea an’ say, ‘Yo, sorry babe, you shouldda fuckin’ told me earlier, now ya  can’t come.’”

Justin keeps this up, mainly amusing himself but drawing a guffaw out of  Tracy every now and then.  I can’t tell if Mark is pouting, or just  antisocial, but he only grunts occasionally.  Finally he loosens up and starts to talk, and I dare to hope he might be less annoying than Justin. 

“Yah, so the fuckin’ punks thought they were all bad an’ shit, so I  fuckin’ straight up poured my Coke on ‘em, kinda flung it out the window an’  shit, and one of da fuckin’ guys is like, ‘hey, man, why’d you do that?’ an’  he’s like this little Mexican fuck, they all are, an’ I’m like, fuckin, ‘What,  do you wanna scrap or sometin’, you little shit!’  I’ll fuckin’ burn you,  man.’”

 Oh boy.

“Dude, it sounds to me like you were fuckin’ the one startin’ shit, an’  shit,” said Justin.

“No way not even, dude, ‘cause they fuckin’ all thought they were all bad  an’ shit, man.  Fuckin’ fuck ‘em up, man.  Shit.”  He pauses for a moment.   “Yo, uh . . . what’s his name?” Mark points towards me.

“Dana,” answers Justin.

“Uh, yeah, uh, Dana, like can we stop?  I gotta call an’ find out my  brother’s beeper number.”

Not “I have to make a call.”  No, he has to mention the beeper.  What a  stud.  “Yeah, okay,” I say.  I happen to know that beepers are the new rage in  the social scene in L.A., but perhaps he’s hoping I’ll think he deals drugs.   We stop at a gas station and he tries to get through.  After stretching our  legs, we all get back in the car, and Justin takes over the front seat.

My repulsion at these kids is deepened by my pride at having made it to UC Berkeley.  I'd assumed there wouldn't be any shit-for-brains dirtbags here.  To realize that there are erodes my feelings about my eventual alma mater.  Worse, I'd been denied admission to Cal as a freshman, and had to transfer in.  How the hell did these kids make it here on their first try?  A pact with Satan?

After another hour of excruciating wannabe-badass banter the kids either wear themselves out or run out of things to say.  The silence  is a relief.  For the first time since we started out, I can hear the car’s  engine running.  The sun is beginning to go down now, and within half an hour  everybody in the car is asleep.  As I flip up the rear view mirror to  nighttime mode, I catch a glimpse of a touching scene:  Tracy has slumped over  on Mark, her head cradled in his armpit.  As he snores loudly, his mouth  hanging open and his head tilted forward, a long strand of drool drips off his  lower lip and makes a glistening pool in her shiny hair.  This continues all  the way to Isla Vista.  I won’t bother to describe the endless chore of  dropping them all off at their various friends’ houses.  Then I drive a  hundred miles back to San Luis Obispo.

Sunday at 2:00, I’m back in Isla Vista, at the Chevron station where we  all agreed to meet.  The gas tank is on empty, so I have to wait in a long  line of cars, all college students preparing to head back up north.  Though it  was cool in the morning in San Luis Obispo, it’s already getting hot.  I hear  a string of familiar profanities, and sure enough  my three least favorite  passengers come loping up, eyes bloodshot and hair ravaged.  They’re all  wearing exactly the same clothes they had on two days before.  Ana had only  been with us for the trip down, so these three alone are to comprise my  company for the drive back.  I begin reminding myself of all the reasons why  Greyhound is a loathsome way to travel.

Gas is $1.49 a gallon at this Chevron.  I wonder if they raised the  prices for the Halloween weekend.  “Okay guys, I need gas money.  Four bucks  a person.”

“Sorry, dude.  I don’t have any money.  My fuckin’ friend stiffed me on  beers and I’m totally broke,” Mark says.  Does he tell the theater usher he  spent all his money on popcorn and Milk Duds? I wonder.

“Wait a second, dude,” says Justin.  “We shouldn’t have to fuckin’ pay  all that ‘cause you took all the gas driving back and forth between here and  SLO.”

“Now hold on.  You should be grateful I drove you guys all the way down  here and back.  It’s not like I enjoyed the extra four hours in the car.”

“Yeah, man, but wait a second.  Fuckin’ wait a second.  Just wait a  fuckin’ second.  You fuckin’ need us, man.  The rental wouldda been hella bank  without us.”

“No, I could just pay more.  None of you could rent a car without me.   You would have been stuck up in Berkeley.”

“No, dude, not even.  I couldda fuckin’ had any of my buddies drive me.   They’d have been stoked to drive down here an’ shit.”

I decide not to discuss it.  I finish pumping and go in to pay.  Then I  go to the restroom and change into some shorts, and walk back to the car.   Just behind the car, Justin is frisking Tracy playfully while Mark practises  his best scowl. 

“Dude, there’s no fuckin’ way driving to SLO and back takes that much  gas.  You must’ve driven all over the place with our gas,” Mark says.

“Just shut up and get in the car,” I snap, throwing my jeans in the trunk  and slamming the lid.  I slide in behind the wheel and hand Tracy my drink.   Reaching in my pocket for the car keys, I realize they’re still in the pocket  of my jeans.  In the trunk.

“Guys,” I snort, “We’re fucked.”  My foul epithet falls flat, rendered  impotent by its overuse throughout the trip.  “I locked the keys in the  trunk.”

“Aw, fuck dude.  What’r ya gonna do now?”

“Well, you’re all so street smart.  Break in there.  Jimmy the lock.”

Justin rolls his eyes.  “Aww, dude.”  Mark stares blankly at the back  seat, struck dumb.  The gears in his head grind to a halt.  He picks tentatively at the upholstery.  Finally he speaks.  “Uh, ya gotta cut out the  seat, dude.”

But Justin has a better idea.  “We’ll be at Jack in the Box,” he tells  me.  They trot off into the shopping center beyond the gas station.  I look  down the long line of cars waiting to fill up.  I glance towards the cashier.   How long will he wait before having my car towed?  The students behind me are  in no hurry  yet.  Good thing I’m not in Berkeley.  I’d have been lynched by  now. 

I sit down in the back seat and tug at the seatback.  No way.  Then I  spot the plastic casing from which the shoulder belt issues.  I easily pop it  away from the seatback, and slip my finger beneath the stiff carpet extending  horizontally from the top of the seatback to the rear window.  With a tug the  carpet is free of the seatback, and I can run my hand along the steel frame of  the car  with the trunk just beyond it.  A long cut out in the steel just  allows me to get my hand through.  If I had a light, I could see into the  trunk.  But I can’t get my arm through.  I pull my hand out and call to the  attractive blonde at the next car.  “Excuse me, could you come here?”

“What for?” she asks, walking over.

“I locked my keys in the trunk.  Can you fit your hand through this  hole?”  Her hand is nice and slim  her wrist too small for a man’s watch.  But  she shies away, giving up just after her fingertips entered the hole.   “Sorry,” she says. 

“Aw, that’s all right.”  Fishing for a stranger’s keys is above and  beyond the call of duty.  I stare at the exposed metal some more.  Suddenly I  notice that the stereo speaker comes right through the frame:  Aha.  If I  could remove the speaker, I’d have a large hole right into the trunk.  The  cut out I’d been putting my hand into might just be close enough to the  speaker to give me a shot at the speaker.  I slip my left hand through, and  grope for whatever simple clip I know must hold that speaker in place.  My  fingertips brush something.  I shove the hand farther in, scraping off a thin  layer of flesh.  (Even as I type, tonight, I can see the faint pink scar.)   Now, I can feel the little spring steel clip.  I try pushing it one way, then  the other.  Now it is disengaged, and I  wiggle the speaker back and forth.   Suddenly it pops out, and I let it drop.  Now I have a generous five inch hole  into the trunk.  I thrust in an arm and triumphantly haul out my jeans, like a  magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat.  In five seconds I’ve got the engine  running.  A miracle.  Where one minute ago I had a giant steel anchor to tow  away, now I’ve got twenty four valves allowing the proper mix of gasoline and  air into six huge cylinders, to power one hundred glorious explosions per  second, perfectly controlled to move the car forward that precious ten feet  that saves me getting towed, and stranded, and thoroughly distraught. 

Easing the car forward, my euphoria spikes again as a wonderful and  devilish thought seizes me.  I reach across the car and lock the two opposite doors, then those on my side.  I crack my window.  Slowly taxiing through the Jack in the Box parking lot,  I spy my freshmen hoods, talking and laughing at a window booth.  I honk the  horn loudly, three times, and slow to a halt.  They come running out, amazed  to see the car mobile.  As they come within six feet, I put the car in gear  and begin to slowly roll away.  Tracy reaches out for the door handle, and finds it useless. 

Justin, clinging to my door handle, yells at me through the cracked window.  “Yo, dude, what the FUCK?!  What the fuck you doin’?!”

I yell back:  “Justin, the freshman attrition rate at Cal is like 30 percent.  You’re not going to make it.”

He yells, “Dude, what the fuck does that have to do with anything?!”

I reply, loudly but matter-of-factly, “I’m going to start the attrition process a little early.”

I drive through the Drive Thru, the kids clinging to the car like leeches,  slapping the windows furiously.  I keep creeping along, laughing hysterically,  turning up the stereo to be deaf to their cries.  Justin sprawls out on the  hood, shouting and making obscene gestures.  I cannot hear his voice, but his  lips spell out those all too familiar words.  Then he slides off.

Now I’ve reached Hollister Avenue, where I signal a right turn and carefully  pull out of the parking lot.  Reaching  but not exceeding  the speed limit, I  easily outrun the three screaming teens.  Perhaps they can just see me getting  on the 101, headed north.  Twenty miles later, in Gaviota, I’m still grinning  from ear to ear.

Ah, but of course I couldn’t really bring myself to do it.  I guess I’ve  just become too soft over the years.  (I had driven over the Jack in the Box,  all right, but I had dutifully picked them all up like I was their damn chauffeur.)  As we pass  Gaviota, Justin breaks the silence following our second argument by slurping  loudly on his Coke, clearing the phlegm noisily out of his throat, and saying,  “Dude, I just cut a big greasy fart!  Haw, haw, haw!”

Never again, I vow.